Posted on 08/06/2012 11:20:28 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Al Armendariz's big mouth cost him his job as a regional administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Now that he's working for the Sierra Club, Armendariz appears even more opinionated about the industry he once regulated.
In his first comments since resigning from EPA in April, Armendariz unloaded on the coal industry, called President Obama the most environmental president ever, and attacked the state of Texas for fighting the EPA in court. He also addressed the controversy surrounding his comments comparing the EPA's philosophy to the brutal tactics used by the ancient Roman army to intimidate its adversaries.
Armendariz's most pointed comments to the Texas Tribune came on the subject of coal. He's spearheading the EPA's Beyond Coal campaign in Texas, which, according to Armendariz, basically amounts to destroying the industry.
TT: What made you decide to join the Sierra Club?
Armendariz: The coal industry is destroying communities, it’s poisoning our air and our water and our land. And it’s damaging our climate in Texas. And I am very concerned about what climate change is going to do to this state, and I’m very concerned about the role of the coal industry in causing climate change. I wanted to join an organization with a track record of success in taking on the coal industry, and I wanted to join an organization that I felt I could contribute to, and contribute to additional success. And I found that in the Sierra Club and in the coal campaign.
TT: So you’re going to be working with the Beyond Coal campaign. What does that mean you’ll be doing exactly?
Armendariz: I have a small handful of objectives. The first is to stop the construction of any new coal plants in Texas. And also to stop the expansion of any additional coal exports from Texas ports [to] overseas. The second objective is to work on the transition … to clean renewable sources of energy. And the third objective is to work really with all of the stakeholders in the state to further the development of renewable sources of energy, like wind and solar and geothermal.
TT: If we shut down coal plants, we still obviously have to get power. Is natural gas part of the solution?
Armendariz: My principal objective is to replace our use of coal with renewable energy sources like wind and solar and geothermal, with efforts at energy efficiency to reduce demand. If we’re going to use natural gas to replace some of the existing coal capacity, I think we should use it as little as possible. And if we’re going to use it, I do think it is incumbent on the natural gas industry to assure the highest standards of protection to the air and the water of the communities that live near the natural gas fields.
When he asked by the Texas Tribune about America’s natural gas boom — thanks to oft-maligned fracking technology — Armendariz, not surpringly, voiced alarm as well. It would seem he wants to rely solely on renewable energy, which accounted for approximately 9% of U.S. energy consumption in 2011, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. See chart below.
Can the United States produce enough electricity from wind, solar and geothermal? According to the government’s own data, wind accounted for 1.20% of energy consumption in 2011, solar was at 0.16% and geothermal was slightly better at 0.23%. Those numbers are minuscule compared to coal’s 20%, and yet Armendariz is now on a warpath to destroy the coal industry.
Interestingly, Armendariz said in the interview he enjoyed good relations with the energy industry as an EPA administrator. That would contrast sharply with his comments in the video that surfaced earlier this year describing the EPA’s approach:
I was in a meeting once and I gave an analogy to my staff about my philosophy of enforcement, and I think it was probably a little crude and maybe not appropriate for the meeting but I’ll go ahead and tell you what I said. It was kind of like how the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they’d crucify them.
And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years. And so you make examples out of people who are in this case not compliant with the law. Find people who are not compliant with the law, and you hit them as hard as you can and you make examples out of them, and there is a deterrent effect there.
Armendariz later apologized and resigned. Texas Tribune didn’t ask him about his comments directly, but did wonder why he skipped a U.S. House hearing this spring. Armendariz said it wouldn’t have been productive in light of his registration in April.
Another interesting tidbit: Armendariz said it was unfortunate the state of Texas wouldn’t work in “partnership with the EPA”. Attorney General Greg Abbott took the EPA to court instead, attacking regulations imposed by government bureaucrats at EPA.
Despite some complaints from the environmentalist left that President Obama hasn’t done enough, Armendariz is still high on his old boss. “I think really without hesitation that he is going to go down as the most environmental of any of our presidents,” he said.
A kool-aid drinking true believer if there ever was one. Not much different than an Al-Qaeda operative.......
Yup, that means you'll buy natural gas, the major stockholders in the suppliers of which (I am virtually certain) have ponied up to the Sierra Club.
/johnny
Shut his power off at his house. See how he likes it.
Apparently the Sierra Club is not just interested in "protecting" Texas and the United States - they want to control the world.
Who are you putzes to control exports?
I wonder if Romney and the GOP remember this :
Barack Obama warned us under his plans, “electricity rates will necessary skyrocket…. Coal-powered plants, natural gas plants, you name it, whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations, that will cost money, that they will pass that money on to consumers.”
CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO OF OBAMA ACTUALLY SAYING IT.
I wonder what they plan to burn to boil the water to create the steam to run the turbines that create the electricity that charges their Priuses?
Yeah, I like that idea.
So instead of using something that has very few other practical uses, they will use tree, which though a renewable resource, provide food, homes for birds, etc.
For years we’ve been berated by the environmentalists to save a tree, recycle, and now they’re going to burn them all with abandon. We can’t cut down trees for paper. We can’t cut down trees because some birds live there. But we can cut down trees to burn.
If I’m not mistaken, trees are still a carbon product, just as coal and oil are. And the coal and oil we’ll just leave sitting there while we wait for the trees to grow so we can burn them.
Now I understand.
“Forget” this guy. Don’t mess with Texas! Hands off our state!
Sabotage of the USA pure and simple. From MOST of our elected officials to the various unbridled alphabet agencies like the EPA it is sabotage.
Our public school systems, thanks to unionized teachers have been for decades sabotaging the minds of children.
Communists professors in our institutions of higher “learning” (indoctrination) are sabotaging our future journalists, lawyers, politicians and giving us a fresh crop of communist teachers for the public schools.
Who do you call to arrest the saboteurs of the country? That’s the nice trick they played on us. NOBODY will arrest them. They control the LEOs and the courts.
For example, there are three main interconnected electricity grid networks in the continental USA today: Eastern, Western and TEXAS. We are virtually independent of the other two grids. This makes us able to make independent choices. We are not impacted by the self-induced brown-outs and shortages the environmentalists has foisted onto the rest of America. Something Liberal Collectivists hate.
This is why they attack our ability to expand our capacity at every opportunity. Make no mistake, they fight nuclear an natural gas plants, as well as wind farms in Texas as hard as they fight coal. God has chosen to not give us much in the way of hyrdo potential or they would probably fight us there, too... :-)
“Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” —Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, Head of Stalin’s NKVD.
This is the motto for the 0bama administration, the bureaucracies, and the 0bama campaign.
BTW, Beria was taken out by Kruschev during the scramble for power after uncle Joe’s death. This statement exemplifies the logical conclusion for Leftists and Leftism.
Silly conservative! Don’t you know that electricty magically springs forth from the outlet?
/liberallogic
Wonder what his salary is? He was hired for his contacts inside the EPA.
Pray for America
What a dope.
EPA’s “philosophy of enforcement,” said EPA’s Region VI Administrator Al Armendariz, is “kind of like how the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean: they’d go into little Turkish towns somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they’d run into, and they’d crucify them.”
This is America. We figured out how to put a man on the moon in ten years. You can't tell me we can't figure out how to burn coal, that we mine right here in the United States of America, and make it work. We can do that.
Barrack Obama--- 2008(?)
In the past, hasn't partial or total memory loss been attributed to Syphilis?
That, and politics.
You pick the easier one to cure...
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